The Twisted Heart Read Free Page A

what felt like another hand settled lightly on her head, the gesture of a priest. But it turned out to be the elbow of a young man who, as he walked past her seat, paused to get the zip up on his jacket. Kit shook herself, faintly disgusted.
    She had left the club because she’d been too tall, and because she’d had the sense that depression was gathering, not within her exactly, but at the edges of the experience. She had had the powerful sense that if she didn’t get out while the going was good, it would cease to be good; that the going barely was good, in fact—was pretty weird, you might say—but that the thing was still at a stage where it would be possible to think about it afterwards as having been good, maybe, viewed in retrospect; the stamping, for example, humorous. She could still be funny about it speaking to someone who hadn’t been there, about the self-regarding boys and the girls with their glue-hard hair—if she chose, and had anyone to speak to .
    Had she stayed, however, she didn’t doubt that she would very soon have reached the point where going to a dance club would have seemed like something she should have known from the start was a mistake, a girl like her, going to a dance club off up out eastwards from town. It almost felt like a mistake now, either despite her having been asked back, or because of it—because he, so-called Joe , had madeher wonder really why she had gone: Joe. He had looked capable; but capable of what, she had no idea.
    Â Â Â Â 
    When the bus reached the High Street, Kit walked along the aisle from the back to the middle exit, stooping to pick up a wallet-sized zip bag that lay on the floor. Ahead, the Queen Street stop was already blocked by several other buses, so Kit’s driver pulled up short. Kit made a hasty offer of the bag to the nearest passenger, a woman, who took it from her in confusion. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, then, ‘Thanks. You’re a star.’
    The driver bent round to see what was happening. Kit scowled back at him.
    As she ran over the High Street she said to herself, you’re a star. You’re a star!
    Â Â Â Â 
    She loped up the Old Bodleian Library’s main staircase two steps at a time. These steps always felt wrong to her. She assumed their dimensions had been worked out so far in the past that even tall people had been short then. At any rate, one step at a time reduced her to mincing her way up, while two required an over-long stretch, and what she considered uncouth athleticism.
    Happily, going down was different. Unless she was positively unwell, Kit liked to rush down this staircase one step at a time as fast as possible, giving her a buzz akin to riffling her thumb through a 900-page paperback.
    She had ordered for herself, on a whim, two different editions of the novel Eugene Aram , based on the life of a real murderer, and written by Dickens’s friend, BulwerLytton. She also expected to find waiting in her name a clutch of W.S. Hayward’s so-so erotic novels. These Kit had ordered from the library’s low-frequency storage dump in case there was any merit in recommending them to her sole student, Orson McMurphy, whose name, she now realised, made him sound rather like a late nineteenth-century Ontario cattle thief.
    Â Â Â 
    Kit slipped through the swing doors of the upper reading room and attempted to walk noiselessly across its exasperating cork floor. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not that it was any big deal. Who spent their Friday nights in the library before the start of a new academic year? Outcasts and lunatics, was her answer to this question, or more bracingly, those with nothing better to do.
    She strolled light-footed past the ranks of vast work tables, towards the issue desks, about to have to retrieve a stack of mid-Victorian erotica, oh dear. She had long since stopped needing to give the librarians her name. They